The Terrible Being of Lightness

Once upon a time, there was a man trapped in a tunnel in the sky. The tunnel was not very high, but it held him above most others. It was smooth and calm and protective and nearly all-encompassing.

He had found his way there whilst walking across the countryside, trying to discover what life held and that which he wanted to take from it. After cresting a hill, he saw a path that seemed, if not golden, at least bronzed. He began to walk along it, discovering, as he went that it was indeed bronze and that this bronze flecked off on a regular basis, providing a healthy and increasingly comfortable living.

After he had walked a while, he discovered that he had now forsaken his initial goal of discovering life and trying it on for size and now seemed to exist merely to follow the bronze path, which was increasingly inclined and had begun to crater down, an rising impression blocking out the rest of the land. That initially bothered him, but he was soon distracted by the bronze and the nice things he got with it.

Before long, the walls of the depression had started to occlude the view of the sky above. Very soon, he was in an outright tunnel. This first startled and scared him. He consoled himself, though, with the thought of all the wonderful bronze he was accumulating, and he continued on, now simultaneously conscious of, and essentially oblivious to, the fact that he was continuing on to nowhere.

After many years of walking in the dark enjoying his pointless bronze but suffering from a niggling pain in the back of his mind, he stopped to think. This was fatal, of course, as it always is. As soon as he did, the tunnel became sheer, light flooded in, and the man could see himself, grown old, tired, and now pointless. All around, he saw other tunnels, filled with other people, some sheer, some dark. Down on the ground, he saw a few people, talking, walking, and enjoying each other and the land. He wanted to go down to them, but, when he turned back to view the path back, from where he had started, so long ago, he discovered that the tunnel was merely a small, pathetic circle.